I like brevity. If you haven’t noticed I like to keep these posts short and to the point and that is why I was surprised to see that Twitter had decided to remove the 140 Character limit from their direct messages. While this only holds true for private messages it seems to be a step in the right direction. A quote that I keep up on my wall says, “Keep things simple but never more simple than they are” and it seems like this 140 character limit makes us trim all branches from the tree of our conversation leaving a trunk that looks more like a post than a tree. That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for concise writing but there seemed to be such a race to embrace the 140 character limit that all nuance was sacrificed on the altar of technological progress leaving us with discourse brought down to hello and goodbye. Perhaps we will begin to re-examine the effects of technology on how we live and relate to each other and the world around us and see that everything can’t be reduced to 140 characters.

In Esther M. Sternberg’s book “Healing Spaces” there is a chapter about public spaces and I found it interesting that in open spaces, public squares and as such, we tend to navigate toward an object in the square, a bench or fountain in a square or park even if it is not the quickest route. It seems that we are drawn to objects in on open space. I wondered if the same was true of cyberspace until I remembered the uproar when Google changed its home page a few years ago. The story is detailed in the excellent, “The Google Story” by David Vise and Mark Malseed, but suffice it to say the changes were not well received and the white background was quickly returned. We seem to have an attachment to these electronic signposts that we gravitate toward like lampposts in the public square. Do we find ourselves needing these electronic safe places to navigate the wilderness; to keep us from ending up in the twilight zone?

It was with a sort of dread I approached the gates of ( It isn’t my favorite Disney Park) when my daughter stopped and said, ”what’s that?” pointing to what looked like several enormous potatoes suspended in the air. It turns out that these were to be the floating islands of Pandora that were being built as a part of the coming “Avatar” attraction. I like the movie Avatar and the idea that the entire planet of Pandora is connected, the planet as a single organism. This idea is not unlike the Internet of Things, that everything will be connected to everything else in one large meta organism. It was odd to think of this at a Disney property, people who are known for understanding the interconnectedness of an organism. That a theme park can work like a living entity, predicting needs and providing services before we know that we need them. For example ponchos are moved to the front of the stores when rain is in the forecast, characters “magically” appear on the edge of crowds to disperse groups of people and increase traffic flow. Perhaps Disney is our working model for the internet of things and the true prototype of the world of tomorrow that EPCOT was intended to be.